Thursday, September 19, 2013

If you needed a reminder where those folks on the far right who naive
mainstream Democrats keep mistakenly treating as rational actors are
coming from, just survey the "secessionist" campaigns in various states,
most notably Maryland at present.

One of the leaders of a group of western Maryland counties' efforts
to secede and form a 51st state (good luck with that), a fellow named
Steve Strelczyk, appeared on Fox's America Live yesterday and
explained himself, sorta -- brushing off the obvious question: Well, you
live in a democracy; are you just unwilling to live by majority rule?

STRELCZYK: In some sort of way, that could be correct.
However, the real issue that we see in this state, I think the primary
issue, is the fact that the state has been so badly gerrymandered. ...
Through the normal electoral process we cannot even change that. So we
don't feel that we are being represented there, our needs aren't taken
into account, and we simply feel that our differences are
irreconcilable, so therefore we are seeking an amicable divorce.

Strzelczyk said the biggest concerns are increasing taxes, and the
Democrat-controlled legislature gerrymander voting district so that the
state’s big metropolitan areas have the most representation and tighter
gun laws enacted this year, which he calls “the last straw.”
The movement is just one of several across the country that includes
the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, Northern California and several
conservative northern Colorado counties.
The Colorado effort is backed by the Tea Party movement and has
gotten the issue put on the November ballot as a non-binding referendum.
The movement was also driven in large part by state lawmakers passing
tighter gun-control legislation this year that was signed by Democratic
Gov. John Hickenlooper.

... Still, secession will not be easy, for a variety of reasons,
including that many of these remote, rural regions rely on money
generated in their state’s more commercial and populated cities. And
secession leaders would need state and federal approval, which seems
unlikely considering the last time a region broke off was 1863, when 50
western Virginia counties split to form West Virginia.

Bizarre as it seems, the effort is part of a trend. In Colorado, up to
10 rural counties want to break off and form a new state called Northern
Colorado. A handful of counties in Kansas and Nebraska are reportedly
thinking about joining them. Several counties in Northern California are
hoping to combine with a chunk of Southern Oregon to form the state of
Jefferson – an old idea that apparently hasn’t gone out of fashion. And
folks in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula fed up with Lansing have also been
kicking around the idea of cutting loose.

The media have framed these stories as a symptom of a growing
rural-urban divide, and that’s true. Gun safety laws enacted after the
Sandy Hook shootings sparked the move in both Colorado and Maryland.
Marriage equality for gays and lesbians, and differences over energy
policy, immigration (over which state governments have little control)
and taxes are often cited as “irreconcilable differences” by these
secession advocates.
But it’s also another sign of the difficulty that a group which
dominated American politics just a generation ago – a group political
scientist Alan Abramowitz narrowed down to married white people who
identify as Christians – are having adapting to a country that’s
becoming more diverse and embracing a different, more liberal set of
cultural values. As Michael Rosenwald noted in The Washington Post,
“with secessionists, the term ‘final straw’ comes up a lot.”

An analysis of Census data by Moyers & Company found that
non-Hispanic whites make up 93.5 percent of the rebellious Colorado
counties, a higher share than the 87.7 percent of the rest of the
state’s population. Unsurprisingly, there’s also a significant partisan
gap — only around 39 percent of those living in the break-away North
voted for Obama in 2012, while the rest of the state supported him by a
52-46 margin, according to an analysis of election returns.

Those divides are even more dramatic in Maryland, where a 26-point
gap in presidential preferences separates the five counties considering
secession from the rest of the state. Breakaway Maryland is 85 percent
white, while whites make up just 51 percent of the population in the
rest of the counties, according to a Washington Post analysis.

This is the reaction we've come to know and expect from people on the
hardnosed edges of the American right: At the end of the day, they
don't really believe in democracy. They don't believe in putting up with
other citizens who believe differently, who pray differently, who dress
and wear their hair and their clothes differently and eat differently
and most of all who think differently from them.
They like the idea of America as a big all-white nation. They don't like the idea of America as a democracy.

Their antipathy to democracy always creeps out, even in their
conspiracy theories (how many times have we heard the far-right refrain,
"This is a republic, not a democracy!"), but more importantly in their
actions and their political strategies, embodied most recently in the
gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the ongoing efforts at voter
suppression by conservative Republicans.

And when they realize they are not going to get their way, their
solution is not to accept the verdict of democracy. Their solution is to
drop out.

Sara Robinson has worked as an editor or columnist for several national magazines, on beats as varied as sports, travel, and the Olympics; and has contributed to over 80 computer games for EA, Lucasfilm, Disney, and many other companies. A native of California's High Sierra, she spent 20 years in Silicon Valley before moving to Vancouver, BC in 2004. She currently is pursuing an MS in Futures Studies at the University of Houston. You can reach her at srobinson@enginesofmischief.com.